[Paul McLean]

June 2013

An illustration from Esprit Jouffret's Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions. The book, which influenced Picasso, was given to him by mathematician Maurice Princet.

'Picasso was particularly struck by Poincaré's advice on how to view the fourth dimension, which artists considered another spatial dimension. If you could transport yourself into it, you would see every perspective of a scene at once. But how to project these perspectives on to canvas?' - Arthur I. Miller

^Theoretical physicist James Clerk Maxwell is best known for his work in formulating the equations of electromagnetism. He was also a prize-winning poet, and in his last poem Paradoxical Ode, Maxwell muses on connections between science, religion and nature, touching upon higher-dimensions along the way. [Wikipedia: Fourth Dimension in Literature]

^ "In plastic art, I believe, there is a fourth dimension which may be described as the conciousness of a great and overwhelming sense of space-magnitude in all directions at one time, and is brought into existence through the three known measurements." - Max Weber (The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point of View)